1st Google+ 'Hangout' in Space Connects Astronauts with Earth

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Thousands of space fans young and old got a taste of what life in
space is like Friday (Feb. 22) during NASA's first-ever Google+
Hangout with astronauts on the International Space Station.

The live online video conference connected three members of the
space station's crew with chat participants from around the world
and came just days after the $100 billion space
laboratory briefly
lost communications with NASA Mission Control.

"The space station is a robust, tough space ship," Canadian Space
Agency
astronaut Chris Hadfield said when asked about the
communications malfunction. "We worked together as a crew
following the procedures as we're trained to do. After just a
couple orbits, we had the computers talking to the antennas
properly so we could talk to the ground. We were working together
as a team."

Expedition 34 commander Kevin Ford and flight engineer Tom
Marshburn, both of NASA, joined Hadfield in answering questions
from their online audience, which peppered the crew with
questions via Twitter, Google+ and YouTube. The questions ranged
from what books the astronauts read to how a cat might deal with
life in zero gravity. [ Take
a video tour inside the space station ]

Two students from Union High School in Iowa asked the astronauts
to explain why space agencies around the world have people living
in space.

"The whole point of having a space station is to have some place
in space where people can take their ideas," Ford responded. "We
have a huge power supply up here. We have a lot of rack space,
and we have a lot of scientists on the ground with a lot of ideas
of things to do in space."

Space station astronauts are expected to monitor their health
very closely to see how the body changes when exposed to
microgravity. Hadfield was in the middle of one of those health
experiments today.

Marshburn — a medical doctor — explained that two non-invasive
temperature probes attached to Hadfield's head and chest allow
the scientists see how his natural body cycles have changed since
being in orbit.

Because the space station experiences 16 sunsets and as many
sunrises in any given day, the circadian rhythms of station
astronauts tend to change a great deal while in orbit, the
astronauts said. Hadfield's temperature-monitoring probe will
help doctors keep track of just how much those change.

The space station residents have contingency plans for medical
emergencies too.

A group of students from the Neil Armstrong Institute in
Monterrey, Mexico asked the spaceflyers what would happen if one
of their colleagues fell ill while in space.

Marshburn explained that there are always two medical officers as
part of the six person crew. The designated residents are trained
to perform medical procedures that will stabilize the injured
spaceflyer until he or she can be sent back to Earth using the
Russian Soyuz capsule that brought them to the station.

The question and answer session with the space station lasted
about 20 minutes, but NASA astronauts on the ground Nicole Stott
and Ron Garan fielded questions from the audience for the other
40 minutes.

Hadfield, Ford and Marshburn make up half of the Expedition 34
crew currently living on the International
Space Station. Three Russian cosmonauts round out the crew.

The International Space Station is the largest structure ever
built in space. It is the size of a football field and was
constructed by 15 different countries working under five space
agencies representing the United States, Russia, Europe, Canada
and Japan.

Construction of the space station began in 1998 and it has been
continuously staffed by international astronaut crews working on
a rotating mission schedule since 2000.